Hitler's Panzers

by Dennis Showalter

  This relative democratization in good part reflected the growing synergy between National Socialist ideology and the demands of the front. Hitler wanted young men “as tough as leather, as fleet as grey-hounds, and as hard as Krupp steel,” correspondingly unburdened by reflection or imagination. The Red Army at its best did not offer sophisticated tactical opposition. What division and regimental commanders wanted in subordinates was tough men physically and morally, those willing to lead from the front and publicly confident in even the most desperate situations. One might speculate, indeed, that a steady supply of twentysomething lieutenants with wound badges and attitudes helped older, wiser, and more tired majors and colonels to suppress their own doubts about Hitler and his war. And men with such conditioning were more likely to encourage than restrain aggressive behavior against “others” and “outsiders.”

  VII

  IN OTHER WARS Kiev was a victory for the ballad-makers. In this one it was no more than the first step to what the General Staff regarded as the campaign’s finale: a drive for Moscow that Halder expected to force Russia out of the war on any terms Germany chose to impose. Hitler, who had been considering the prospect of continuing operations into 1942, found no difficulty accepting an audacity that matched, perhaps even exceeded, his own. A new directive of September 6 acknowledged Moscow as the focal point of the campaign’s next stage.

  The blitzkrieg team was frayed. The Luftwaffe’s operational losses had been compounded by the problems of maintenance at improvised forward air strips, and crew fatigue the system refused to recognize. The 2nd Air Fleet, Army Group Center’s opposite number, had approximately 170 single-engine fighters, about the same number of bombers, and 120 ground attack planes. The artillery’s material losses had been limited, but its horses were dying, its vehicles were breaking down, and its ammunition reserves were limited. The infantry was tired. Average divisional strengths had been reduced by a quarter—more in the rifle companies. Morale was still high; and to some degree the shortage of men was compensated by material. Increasing numbers of 50mm antitank guns, effective against T-34s, were coming on line. Army Group Center had 14 battalions of the assault guns that had demonstrated their worth over and over again in all sectors. In the final analysis, however, the attack on Moscow would go as far as the panzers could carry it.

  The code name was Typhoon, and reality approached rhetoric. The initial intention had been to redeploy 4th Panzer Group on Hoth’s left and launch a two-pronged attack. The rapid victory at Kiev enabled Guderian’s group to be brought up on the right. When the number was finalized, Bock had fourteen panzer and eight motorized divisions, more than 1,000 tanks on a 500-mile front. The panzers were not what they had been on June 21. Casualties had been heavy and replacements inadequate. But they remained the cream of the army: tempered but not yet brittle, respecting their enemy but still convinced they had the Soviets’ measure.

  Guderian’s panzer divisions were still at about half their assigned tank strength. The situation in Groups 3 and 4 was better. Two of Hoepner’s divisions had even enjoyed full, albeit brief, refits in France. The problem was sustainability. Shifting Panzer Groups 2 and 4 quickly and smoothly showcased the quality of German staff planning and traffic management, but it came with a price in wear and tear. Hitler had ordered engine production allocated to new vehicles, and the army group had received only 350 replacements. The shortage of other vehicles exceeded 20 percent. Fuel consumption was outstripping the Reich’s production capacity. Existing supplies remained difficult to move forward due to the still-inadequate rail system.

  The main German offensive was scheduled to begin October 2. Panzer Group 4 would follow the secondary road Roslavl-Moscow, then pivot left toward the Smolensk-Moscow highway. Panzer Group 3 would break through in the north and swing right. The two groups would meet at Vyazma in another by-now standard encirclement. The sting in Typhoon’s tail, with apologies for the mixed metaphor, would be provided by Guderian. Panzer Group 2 would jump off two days earlier, break through to the northeast toward Orel-Bryansk, and create a second pocket. The one-two punch would shatter the Soviet central front and open for a second time the road to Moscow. Whether the city would be enveloped or captured by a knife-thrust up the middle was left to contingency. It would be a race against the weather, against Soviet ability to reinforce, and against the Germans’ growing spectrum of losses and shortages. Success depended—again—on speed and shock. Also—Panzer voran!

  The Germans’ opponents were a mixture of worn-down veterans and grass-green conscripts. Most divisions were at half strength in men, less in equipment. All but a few of the tanks were old models, the same ones the Germans had already destroyed by hundreds. Higher headquarters lacked trained staff officers and mutual confidence. The Red Army did not expect the Germans to mount another all-out drive so close to the coming of the autumn rains. When air reconnaissance reported a massive German armored column advancing from Smolensk, the NKVD sought the crews’ arrest for inciting panic.

  The Germans did well enough on that score by themselves. Panzer Group 2 started 17th and 18th Panzer Divisions northwest toward Bryansk. Fourth Panzer Division advanced 80 miles northeast toward Orel in 24 hours, covered 150 miles in four days, and took the city’s defenses so completely by surprise on October 3 that streetcars were still running when the tanks interrupted service. Casualties were fewer than 200 men. Bryansk fell on October 7, and 17th Panzer Division trumped 4th by overrunning an entire Front headquarters.

  Hoepner’s group in Typhoon’s center was able to concentrate 560 tanks in two corps on a mere 50-mile front. The Soviets were simply pushed out of the way, and by October 5, Hoepner was ready to commit his reserve of two panzer and two motorized divisions: the third corps he had not had at Leningrad. Hoth’s group had fewer and less powerful tanks than Hoepner. Its supply problems were greater due to inferior roads. Constant counterattacks slowed its pace. Nevertheless Panzer Group 3’s spearheads found the junction between two Soviet armies, drove a wedge between them, and captured intact a number of major bridges over the Dnieper. Hoth’s promotion to army command under Rundstedt on October 5 had no effect on the well- worked-in staff that welcomed Reinhardt from XLI Panzer Corps. Dependable rather than spectacular, he had raised and shaped 4th Panzer Division, led his corps through France and Russia, and was part of the panzer family.

  The Red Air Force responded to Typhoon in force, the Sturmoviks doing particular damage to tank formations. Guderian recorded personally dodging a series of attacks by low-flying bombers. The panzer groups’ initial successes nevertheless owed much to Richthofen’s Stukas, and to the bombers who interdicted road junctions and rail lines, harassed troop columns, and disrupted communications to the point where the Soviets failed to grasp what was happening to them as it happened. The tanks were used up in small-scale counterattacks. The artillery was overrun in position; the infantry held its ground until cut off.

  Infantry-armor cooperation was closer in the initial stages of Typhoon than at any previous time during Barbarossa. The foot- marchers secured the panzers’ flanks by pinning Soviet frontline divisions in place, then crushing them with set-piece attacks that cost lives but inhibited orderly withdrawal even after Stalin was persuaded to authorize retreat late on October 5. The next evening, Group 3’s 7th Panzer Division cut the Moscow highway at Vyazma from the north. At midmorning on the seventh, Hoepner’s 10th Panzer entered the city from the south, closing a pocket containing 30 Soviet divisions from five armies. Elements of three more armies were enveloped when the infantry divisions of the German 2nd Army linked up with Guderian’s panzers at Bryansk on the seventh and eighth.

  The trapped Russians fought with by-now predictable desperation. The Germans were no less determined, and this time the infantry was close behind the tanks. Fighting continued until the end of October. When final accounts were tallied, the booty included 6,000 guns and mortars, 1,300 tanks, and almost 700,000 men. Another 300,000 Soviet soldiers died anonymously or
just disappeared. A 300-mile gap had been torn in the Soviet line, and no reserves were available to throw in. They had been sent to oppose Army Group South—an overlooked consequence of the battle for Kiev. Zukhov described the situation bluntly: The panzers’ way was wide open; nothing could guarantee against their sudden appearance before Moscow.

  The High Command and Adolf Hitler agreed. And then the same generals who had for weeks been focused on Moscow with laserlike intensity decided that the time had come to end the war on the flanks. Third Panzer Group, now 3rd Panzer Army, was sent northeast to cut the Moscow-Leningrad railway. Guderian’s rechristened 2nd Panzer Army was ordered to send a corps southeast toward Kursk. The rest of it would join Hoepner and take Moscow—when, that is, the mobile divisions were no longer needed to secure the pockets, and once they could refuel.

  Fourth Panzer Division lost two days in Orel with dry tanks and had to “borrow” 3rd Panzer’s fuel allotment to push a weak battle group up the Tula highway. The tactical sun was shining on October 6 when 34th Motorcycle Battalion pulled off another of the Husaresstücke (hussar stunts) by now routine for the panzer bikers by seizing an unde molished bridge. When the tanks crossed, the situation changed. An ambush of T-34s knocked out ten of 35th Panzer Regiment’s tanks and drove the Germans back across the bridge.

  The advance resumed the next day, but the Germans were unable to reinforce and develop their success despite unusually strong air and artillery support. Fuel remained in short supply. The year’s first snowfalls began on October 7. And 4th Panzer faced a different kind of opposition. The Red Army had begun awarding the title “Guards” to formations that distinguished themselves in combat. The 1st Guards Rifle Corps was not what Guards would become. But it put stones in the Germans’ road for four days—time enough to construct a defensive line that held up the panzers for two more weeks.

  In Hoepner’s sector the only division initially available to take the Moscow road was Das Reich, the 2nd SS Motorized. This was the first time the panzer arm entrusted a Waffen SS division with a vital mission, but the men in black were stopped by a roadblock backed by a couple dozen T-34s and 30 BT-7s. Not until October 13 did the advance resume. By that time Zukhov had brought up enough troops to form the Mozhaisk Line near the 1812 battlefield of Borodino. Rain and snow, thaws and freezes, were turning the ground to mud and transforming the overall logistic situation from precarious to desperate. Breaking the Mozhaisk Line took two weeks, first to last. When it was done, five panzer divisions were 80 miles from Moscow as the crow flies. For two weeks more they got no farther.

  Had it been available, 3rd Panzer Army might well have been too much for the hard-tried Ivans. But instead of enveloping the Mozhaisk Line’s nearly open left flank, its divisions were advancing through the mud in the wrong direction. The veteran 1st Panzer Division covered 50 miles in five days to take Kalinin on October 14—but it was moving extrinsically, away from Moscow, as ordered.

  Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Army managed to scrounge enough fuel and ammunition to send XXIV Panzer Corps toward Tula on October 29. In fact the spearhead was a battle group formed from the 35th Panzer Regiment, brought up to 80 tanks by giving it most of the corps’s runners, a rifle company in half-tracks attached from 3rd Panzer Division, and several truck-mounted companies of the Grossdeutschland Regiment. Commanding the mixed bag was Colonel Heinrich Eberbach, a scar-faced veteran of World War I and among the best of the third-generation panzer leaders emerging from Barbarossa. The one available road to Tula began disintegrating immediately, with maximum speed falling to ten or twelve miles per hour: low-gear driving that was itself an extra strain on overworked trucks. The Russians had blown the bridges and laid minefields everywhere. Eberbach’s task force nevertheless advanced 50 miles in five days, and on October 30 he sought to take Tula by storm. The garrison, a mixture of local militia and NKVD troops, threw the Germans out and back in desperate fighting and bought time for reinforcements to pin 2nd Panzer Army in place outside the city till mid-November.

  The battle for Tula highlighted the frontline consequences of long-term overextension throughout Army Group Center. It was not merely a matter of wrestling more supplies forward. The mobile units were declining in effective, deployable strength to a point where commanders were not merely halting units but cannibalizing them. It was common practice to strip out men and vehicles to form ever-weaker spearheads that might still be able to move but found it increasingly difficult to fight, even against the kind of amateur opposition initially faced in Tula. The shock, it might be said, was too small to create awe—and the confusion on which the panzers had depended since 1939.

  The Germans had two choices. One was to go into what amounted to winter quarters, comprehensively refit, and prepare for another offensive in 1942. Kluge was already implementing that approach on his own initiative, tightening the 4th Army’s lines and shifting de facto to the defensive. The alternative was to make one last, absolutely final try for Moscow before winter began in earnest. The distance was so close. The army had come so far. Von Bock urged pushing on. The High Command concurred—and convinced a more or less dubious Hitler.

  The mind-set can be ascribed to ambition. Halder, Bock, Guderian, and their subordinates were concerned, not to say obsessed, with their personal places in history. Linked to that, though not as often noted, were stress and fatigue. Living conditions had been primitive even in headquarters. Leading from the front meant taking risks. Guderian was not the only senior officer who had faced Soviet fire, and it impugns no one’s courage to say that experience is never shrugged off. The operational environment, in short, was anything but conducive to balanced judgment and cold reason in the pattern of the elder Moltke.

  The senior staff officers’ conference held at Orsha on November 13 declared the situation extremely serious and criticized the notion of another large-scale offensive. Halder’s response that it was necessary to trust to “soldier’s luck,” and his later statement that “these battles are less a question of strategic command than a question of energy” seem, in hindsight, at best a desk general’s heroic vitalism, and at worst, hubris in the classical Greek sense. But Halder was no fool. The Russians had repeatedly conjured armies from resources just as repeatedly described as exhausted by German intelligence. What might they achieve given even four uninterrupted months?

  Experience and myth alike, moreover, taught what a Russian winter meant for soldiers—especially a winter spent in the open. Neither the military nor the political leadership had concerned itself with providing winter clothes and equipment for a campaign expected to be finished by autumn. Now coats, gloves, and scarves were collected haphazardly—many extorted from Europe’s Jews—and piled up at railheads, taking priority behind fuel and ammunition. Eventually the survivors of the winter of 1941-42 would receive a medal. Its wearers dubbed it the Gefrierfleischorden: the frozen meat medal.

  When the ground began freezing, there was a certain rejoicing from generals to privates. “Now [we] can afford to take risks,” Bock declared. Instead the panzers lurched forward, measuring progress as much by the onset of winter as by desperate Soviet resistance. Tank crews lit fires under engines in the morning to thaw them enough to turn over. More and more vehicles already held together with spit and tape gave up the ghost. Aircraft had been withdrawn to Reich and the Mediterranean; all that remained was VIII Air Corps with fewer than 100 fighters and 200 strike aircraft—paper strengths heavily eroded by fuel shortages and frozen engines.

  Reinhardt swung south, captured Klin, and reached the Moscow-Volga Canal on November 27, but was promptly ejected from the small bridgehead. The panzer army went over to the defense on November 30, supplies, men, and equipment exhausted by determined Soviet defenders. Guderian made a final attempt to envelop Tula, and on December 2 also shifted to the defense under heavy Soviet pressure and recurring blizzards. Hoepner’s attack ground to a halt within sight and sound of Moscow. Its frontline units had no food, no gasoline, no ammunition, and almos
t no one left in the ranks able to pull a trigger. On the evening of December 1, a reconnaissance patrol reached the train station at Khimki—twelve and a half miles from Moscow: the closest the Germans would get. It might as well have been a hundred and twelve.

  On December 5, with the temperature at 25 degrees below zero, the Red Army counterattacked. Its rear echelons disintegrating, Army Group Center fell back. Panzer Army 3 fought itself to near destruction covering Bock’s left. Sixth Panzer Division expended the last of its 35(t)s and most of its other vehicles, converted its transport to local farm wagons, and reorganized what remained of its panzer regiment as a provisional infantry battalion.

  Hitler’s immediate responses were to issue a general “no retreat” order, and declare war against the US. The latter decision was the least debated; Hitler had to ask where Pearl Harbor was. The former decision reflected Hitler’s fear that the army might unravel completely if subjected to the strain of a long retreat. Guderian responded by flying to Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters. Met with a “hard, unfriendly” stare, for five hours he made the case for local withdrawals and a flexible defense. Hitler recommended using heavy artillery to blast foxholes into the frozen ground. Guderian described the likely result as so many washtubs. The conversation declined from there. On December 26, Guderian was relieved of command.

  Hoepner was next among the senior panzer officers to feel the axe. On January 8 he ordered what was left of a hard-pressed infantry corps to pull back while the option remained. Hitler screamed of an idiotic decision, of criminal betrayal, of cowardice in the face of the enemy. Hoepner was relieved of command, denied a pension, and refused authorization to wear his uniform in public. In farewell, he announced that his behavior was based on responsibility to God and duty to his army and his people.